The Conservative View Simply Cannot Accept Debate
Scholars Decry Law School's About-Face on New Dean
By Sonya Geis
Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, September 14, 2007; Page A02
LOS ANGELES, Sept. 13 -- Scholars across the political spectrum protested what they called an assault on academic freedom after the University of California at Irvine withdrew a job offer from a liberal professor who wrote an op-ed criticizing the Bush administration.
Faculty members were furious, and blogs and editorial pages hummed Thursday with news that constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, 54, would not become de, kmiecan of the University of California's first new law school in 40 years.
Douglas W. Kmiec, a conservative Constitutional scholar and law professor at Pepperdine University who has often debated Chemerinsky called him "a gentle soul, a splendid scholar and a person with a fine legal mind. . . . And I say this as someone who generally disagrees with where his mind is coming from." Kmiec wrote in a Los Angeles Times editorial on Thursday th…